


This Must Be The Place (Home)

by PoetOnAPuzzle



Category: Compilation of Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VII Remake (Video Game 2020), Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children
Genre: F/M, Home, Homecoming, Hurt/Comfort, Leaving Home, tifa - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-03-15
Updated: 2021-03-14
Packaged: 2021-03-23 02:48:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,950
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30048783
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PoetOnAPuzzle/pseuds/PoetOnAPuzzle
Summary: A cold night. A house on the hill. A long walk through a town that was once all he knew. Memories of all those boyhood rites of spring. Beneath the shadow of the house, the same one he once called home, Cloud wonders if he'll ever find that feeling again. Or if he's doomed to forever long for the comfort of a home that's no longer his to remember.
Relationships: Tifa Lockhart/Cloud Strife
Comments: 1
Kudos: 7





	This Must Be The Place (Home)

The night stretches on. Shades of purple and blue and black all blend together in muddled shapes and swaths as they fly past. Roads wind and turn, but Cloud hardly seems to notice. He’s moving on instinct, on memory. Nothing but the feel of the cold air rushing past his face. The rumbling roar of the engine beneath him. The only tethers to this moment in time.

The turn comes up faster than he realizes, and he snaps from the reverie of his thoughts rather abruptly. Easing up on the throttle, he nudges the handlebars to the side and continues up the hill.

The darkness is omnipresent. It presses in on all sides of him. The headlights carve a lonely cone of amber light ahead of him. The only sign of progress is the sight of the mountains getting larger, cutting out more space in the sky.

Soon, Cloud arrives.

When the sound of the motorcycle dies, silence reigns. It moves eagerly, hungrily. Rushing in to fill the void left by the hum of the engine. One moment noise, the next the deafening roar of nothingness.

Cloud flips the kickstand and removes his goggles. He hangs them on the handlebars and pulls the keys from the ignition.

When the headlights die, so does the world around him. Like the silence, the darkness follows quickly and quietly, and within moments, Cloud stands alone at the gates of a town he once knew obscured now by the black of night.

He stares at the archway leading into the city. The details are vague in the pitch dark of midnight, but it doesn’t matter. He remembers everything perfectly. The scratches in the frame from kids playing, throwing rocks, and playing ball. The rusted color of the wood deeply stained from the constant back and forth of cars as they belched gasoline fumes and kicked dust into the air with their fading tire treads.

Cloud breathes deep. Takes in the sense, the scope, the hazy feel of the small mountain town beyond the archway, still looming there, forgotten and abandoned in the dark.

The sound of heavy footfalls breaks the stillness of the evening. Strangely, it only adds to the somber feel of the village. Cloud moves through the dark, strolling like a ghost haunting this old dirt road. He supposes that’s what he looks like. Pale and blond, and the only living thing moving through this dead place.

The light of the moon is weak. Hazy. A fading crescent offering what little glow it has. But it’s enough, and for the eyes Cloud has been gifted with, it’s plenty. Yet, Cloud knows that’s all just a farce. Something he tells himself to make the guilt feel less abrasive. He doesn’t need any light. His body moves of its own accord, awakening age-old routines and paths burned into memories he’s long since tried to bury.

He follows the trail, letting muscle memory take over, feeling like a passenger in his own skin.

Soon, almost without realizing it, he stops.

Central Square is just like the rest of the town. Silent, aging, and strangely off. Cloud doesn’t need to see, he remembers. All those years ago, returning here with the others, somewhere in the heart of their journey to stop that silver-haired shadow begging for the end of the world. They’d stumbled into a carbon copy of their hometown. So close to perfect, but not quite there yet if you looked hard enough.

The core ideas were there, but for anyone that lived here for as long as he had, it would be easy to tell where they’d gotten it wrong.

Roofs painted a shade too green. Fences that lacked loose boards. Gates that no longer creaked when swung. Merchant stalls placed a little too far to the right. Trees missing branches children once climbed.

Above all else, the constant scent of smoke and ash. The taste of burnt air and wood now seared into the very fabric of the town.

Cloud swallows dryly.

Was this a mistake? Coming here? Would reconciliation be something that would elude him forever?

Two lives lived. One starts and ends before the other. A gaping maw of time in-between. 

_Turn around. Leave now. There’s nothing here for you now. No answers, no questions. Just bones._

Cloud shakes his head, dispelling the thoughts. That haunting voice. Ringing now as loud as it had when he’d been winding through the mountains to make it here.

_Just ghosts._

Somewhere beyond him, a streetlight flickers to life. The world blooms into focus around it for the briefest of moments, then fades into shadow. Cloud moves towards it, watching it tick on and off randomly. He stops beneath it, looking up at the orange bulb, winking in and out like a dying star. He taps it with the toe of his boot. The light explodes into a flash of brilliance. Cloud freezes. Then it fades, for good. Whatever powerline inside finally giving its last gasp of electricity.

But in those few seconds of amber shine, Cloud sees it.

He sees it even now, in the shadows and waning light of the moon.

His feet are moving before he even knows it. Carrying him on a path carved out in his memory, one he thought he’d forgotten long ago. That same eerie sense of suddenly being a passenger in his own body has returned. That same sense of being propelled forward, like these movements aren’t his own and he’s just on a set of rails carrying him along whether he wants to be taken or not.

He stops in front of the door. It looks the same as it did all those years ago. Knobbed wood and chipping paint. The doorhandle an aging bronze color. Almost impossibly, it squeaks the same way it did all those years ago.

The hinges on the other hand don’t make a sound, which frightens Cloud. A recollection of the shrill whine of rusting metal scraping against itself that never comes. A collision of memories in his mind jumbling together. What should be happening straining against what isn’t.

He pushes anyway, letting the door swing open.

_Just another ghost. This town isn’t the one you remember. It’s just the work of what someone else thinks you’ll remember._

But it’s close enough. So close that his mind struggles to coalesce against all the details it gets right and all the ones it gets wrong.

The threshold is smaller than he remembers. He feels painfully bigger now, standing in the doorway. He nearly touches the top of that archway with his hair now. A giant in the space a child once stood. Cloud reaches out, fingers feeling along the wall beside him, searching in the dark. They ghost over nicks in the wall. Spots lightly cut into the wood. Spaced cleanly at first, then almost sporadic.

A memory comes crawling from somewhere deep inside him. The echo of a pencil gliding along the wood. The feel of a ruler resting gently atop the crown of his head.

His mother’s voice in his ear. Soft and soothing. Pushing back against the quiet of the house beyond.

_‘One day you’ll grow to be so big and strong, Cloud. Just you wait.’_

Cloud swallows, feeling like his throat has been filled with sand.

“You were right, Mom,” Cloud says to the dark of the house, “You always were.”

He steps inside, shutting the door behind him. The lightlessness envelops him. Outside, the darkness is harsh, but it seems almost natural. The product of a town nestled away in the mountains without much in the way of power and electrical wiring, save for the necessities. Here though, inside the house, it feels oppressive. As though it’s bristling against Cloud’s audacity in disturbing it.

Above all else, Cloud can’t shake the feeling that he’s suddenly become some kind of intruder. An invader inside the home that was once his.

Pulling out a small flashlight from his back pocket, he hesitates, afraid of what he might see and what memories the light will dredge up. Then Cloud steels himself. The flashlight tears at the dark corners of the house, rending away the darkness of the night.

The kitchen is just as he remembers it. Everything in its right place. So much closer to how things were before the fire.

A small wooden table in the center of it, just big enough for three people, but far too spacious for two. Looking at it now, it still feels that way. He remembers which corner he sat in, and which one Mom did. He never stopped to think about how that started, but somehow it did, and the habit stuck. Up until the day he left.

Cloud places the flashlight on the table, tilting the light against the wall so it covers the room in a faint fluorescent hue.

The details of the house begin to come together.

The far-left wall is a mass of wooden cabinets, coupled with an iron sink, empty and filled with only dust. A stove sits equally dusty and unused next to the sink. There’s an empty dishrack and an old towel on a hook above it, once a pristine white, now an ugly faded yellow.

The right side of the wall is what Cloud remembers most. A few old couches and sofa chairs. The deep maroon now fading to brown. A fireplace, complete with a set of pokers and iron prodding tools, but no remnants of ashes any longer, just dust. Bookshelves line the walls, but there’s nothing in them. Just a few scattered tomes and a dictionary. Cloud crosses the room and studies the books. They’re not the ones from his childhood. They’re not photo albums, chronicling his journey from a baby boy to a scrawny, knobby-kneed youth. They’re just throwaway paperbacks. Cheap and mass-produced. Shoved haphazardly in the shelves only to further sell the illusion.

Cloud sighs, dusting the cover of one. He examines it, wishing it could somehow change into the photo-album it’s supposed to be. Or one of the mystery novels Mom always kept but refused to let him read.

_‘They’re too scary for you, Cloud. Too violent. You can read them when you’re older.’_

Cloud smiles sadly. He remembers sneaking downstairs in the night to thumb through the pages. He’d managed to read maybe three or four of them before he was eleven. By the time he was fourteen, a few months before he left, mom had caved and let him read them freely. 

He stuffs the book back on the shelf, feeling an odd sense of disgust.

The couches feel almost unused. Devoid of the lumps and hollow spots he so distinctly remembers from his youth. The left side of the sofa doesn’t dip the way he remembers. The back of the reclining chair feels stiff like it has never been broken in. The whole room feels like that. Unused and foreign. Just furniture used for window dressing.

For all the money they had, Shinra was only able to get close enough. Never all the way there.

But close enough certainly seems good enough at that moment. Standing in that hollow room, Cloud realizes if he stops looking at all the small details and subtle nuances he remembers, if he stops trying to separate himself from this house and all that happened here, he can still see the home that was once his.

He can remember napping on that maroon couch in the fading warmth of the hot summer sun. Can remember curling beneath a blanket to read a book near the comfortable heat of the fireplace. There were all kinds of memories, bubbling up from the depths of him now, sliding across the silver screen of memory behind his eyes. Playing solitaire when he was lonely and bored. Doing schoolwork sprawled across the floor of the living room, feeling the carpet chafe at his knees and elbows. Waving a wooden sword about as he danced through the halls, pretending to slay evil-doers alongside the man who had once been his silver-haired hero.

Cloud gasps, feeling momentarily overwhelmed. Heart beating loudly in his ears. Blood pounding in his temples.

He turns, and for an agonizingly long few seconds, thinks he might run. Might go bolting from the house as though it has sprouted teeth and come shambling after him. His stomach flips queasily, and there’s another alarming moment where Cloud realizes he can’t run because he thinks he might be sick on the dusty floor.

_Steady now. It’s just another ghost. Just another ghost._

Straightening, Cloud steels his nerves again and breathes deep. The scent of smoke and the taste of ash – ever-present -- is heavy on his tongue. He pauses, memorizing it.

At the far end of the room, the middle wall, opposite the front door, is a hallway. It leads down deeper into the house. Cloud picks up the flashlight from the table, the soft light bouncing along the walls gone, now shiningly strongly in front of him. The shadows nip at his back.

Cloud descends the hallway, trailing a calloused finger along the wall. There used to be picture frames here. He can feel where the dust has settled unevenly. The pads of his fingertips drifting along bits of paint, chipped and ground down by the edges of wooden frames. Tiny holes where nails had once been driven.

In his mind, he can still see the frames on the wall. Here there was once a picture of him on his first day of Middle School. There, a picture of him with skinned knees and dirt all down the front of his shirt from playing, the faintest curve of a smile, but eyes so full of life. Above that, once, a snapshot of him and his mother on Cloud’s tenth birthday.

He turns, half-expecting to find the wall now filled, covered from top to bottom in moments captured on yellowing polaroids.

But there’s nothing. Just shadows and dust.

Cloud breathes, stomaching the disappointment. Once upon a time, he had loathed most of those photos. Had begged for them to be taken down, hidden away. Now, he wishes he could have saved some of those photos.

He thinks he might have liked them now.

Would he have found them charming? Maybe even a little funny? Cloud doesn’t know. Tifa might have. Maybe that’s reason enough for them to have been saved. If only to prove that he had been here. That he had once been a boy like any other. One with big, impossible dreams. One who smiled easier, laughed more often, and dreamed peacefully. 

If nothing more, than to prove that life had once been so simple for him. Just a small-town kid with small-town dreams.

But fires don’t give. Fires only take. And the flames that had ripped through Nibelheim had left nothing but the charred skeletons of homes. Foundations could be rebuilt. Wood replaced; brick re-laid. But some things could never be recovered. The details that made a house a home.

Cloud moves on.

_Just another ghost…_

At the end of the hall are two doors. He stares at the one on the right. Sees the scuffs where the loose bolt of the doorknob had ground against the wood. Remembers the shuddering clicks it used to make when he turned it.

Cloud swallows, “Not yet.”

He pushes open the door on the left and presses in against the wall of dust the rattles free.

There’s a bed, exactly where he knew it would be. A dresser on the opposite wall, complete with a large vanity. A window on the back wall lets in the faintest rays of moonlight. The nightstand is missing the picture frame it once held, and the alarm clock he remembers ringing before his on schooldays is gone. But the details are closer here.

Somehow the room smells exactly as he remembers it. The scent of ash feels fainter here. Faded and unintrusive.

He sits on the bed. Feels the springs creak and grown. Feels the rough, frayed cotton of the blankets. Remembers the warm weight of them, heavy on his form. An image bubbles up to the surface of his mind. A shadow, long on the wall. A memory from when he was little and would stand in her doorway when he felt sick, or scared, or lonely and would ask her to read him a story or sing him to sleep. Whispering her name so he wouldn’t startle her awake.

Cloud remembers.

The few missing pictures, the forgotten alarm clock, the oiled hinges of the door. None of it shatters the illusion. Whatever gaps there are, his mind fills them quickly, eagerly.

He stands, suddenly feeling like an intruder. Some terrible thing haunting the room in which he can recall so perfectly. In the mirror, Cloud catches his reflection. His eyes seem to glow in the darkness. An ethereal green swirling through icy blues. They’re not the eyes he grew up with. They’re just the ones he’s come to know now.

He feels so alien. So out of place beneath this roof, inside these walls. He’s so much taller, so much more muscular, so much more _scarred._

Broken time and again. Stitched back together over and over. Always coming back a little hollower than before.

_Would you recognize me, Mom?_

He flees from the room, feet thudding heavily on the floor as he goes. Cloud shuts the door quickly behind him, trapping the ghosts -- the guilt -- inside.

Cloud tries to steady his breathing. Tries to steady the roaring war drum in his chest. It pounds in his ears, strains against the bones of his chest, doubles his breathing.

Gripping the place where the pounding originates, he stills himself. Shuts his eyes. Quiets his mind.

_Enough. Settle. Settle. Just another ghost._

A thought, an answer, comes unbidden from a wicked corner of his mind. It’s a thought with teeth, an answer laced with venom.

_She wouldn’t recognize you. Not your eyes, not your smile. You are not who you were then._

Cloud leans his head against the door. Feels the cold wood against the back of his scalp. He rears up and thumps it once against the wood, softly.

“Quiet,” he whispers to the dark of the house.

In front of him is the final door. The door to the room he’s been saving for last. The door to the room he’s been dreading the most.

His old room. The space where he grew up. The four walls that housed him for the first fourteen years of his life.

For a moment, Cloud lingers outside in the hall, flashlight painting the floorboards in its flimsy light. Cloud stills, lets his mind wander, lets it coalesce and recollect. Then he palms the handle and turns. The door swings open silently, just like all those years ago. The quietness of those hinges had helped him sneak out many a time. Now, the soundless swing feels foreboding.

He steps into the room and lets the wooden frame slowly close shut.

This isn’t his room. Not anymore. Cloud tells himself this over and over. But it doesn’t stop the illusion. Doesn’t shatter the imagery.

It’s not his room. Not really. But it sure looks like it. It even _feels_ like it.

The bed is pushed to the middle of the room, headboard pressed right beneath the center window, so the moonlight washes the blankets in its pale glow. The sheets are a nondescript dark blue that itches at his fingers as he presses a hand to the fabric. The closet at the front of the room is empty. A dark hole in the wall filled with shadows and dust. Cloud feels momentarily on edge looking at it, fully believing for just a fraction of a second some age-old monster will come barreling out of that shadowy cut in the wall. Cloud reaches up, hand searching for the hilt of a sword that isn’t there. On the far wall, to the right of the bed, is a dresser made of bleached wood, complete with three large drawers.

In every other room of the house, he felt like an invader. Like a giant in a cage. Here, in this room – _his room_ – Cloud suddenly feels painfully small. As if, upon stepping through the doorway, he’s somehow aged backward.

He feels so frighteningly lost and inadequate.

Moving slowly, gently, he grips the headboard of the bed and pulls. The wooden feet groan and shriek against the floor, kicking up dust and shattering the quiet. Cloud pulls anyway. When he’s moved it a few feet from the wall, he lets go. Breathing in the dust, pausing for the quiet to return.

There’s a loose floorboard before him. Right near the center of where the bed had just been. Impossible to discern from the rest if you weren’t looking for it. Cloud leans down and wiggles the board free. It, too, protests. The sound of wood scraping against wood. But sure enough, it comes free. Cloud sets the loose board aside.

The gap between the floorboards is maybe a foot long, three or four inches wide. It’s small, but the blackness that gazes back up at Cloud feels endless. A chasm beneath the lacquered panels that tumbles down into absolute nothingness.

For a moment, Cloud fumbles with the idea of shining the flashlight in it. Just to break the illusion, to ease his mind. Maybe to prove what he left down in that little hideaway spot is still there, had survived the fire and the years that followed.

Then he decides against it. It will be there. Somehow, he just knows.

Cloud reaches his hand in the gap. His fingertips graze paper, then something rougher. Something with hard edges. For a moment he can’t believe it’s still here. That it’s survived the fire, the test of time.

From that little wooden rift, Cloud pulls a piece of paper - a pamphlet - no bigger than a page from a newspaper, now yellowed and frayed at the edges, covered in a thin layer of dust and soot. And wrapped inside of it is a crude wooden sword. Just two roughly weathered pieces of plyboard nailed together at the juncture, creating the facsimile of a blade and hilt. No bigger than his forearm. He holds it up to the moonlight, turns it over in his hand, grips the hilt. He can barely close his fist around it now. But Cloud remembers. Remembers his boyhood love of running through the halls, swinging it around, felling monsters and evildoers alike. All beside the silver-haired man who had once been his hero. His idol. His aspiration.

Cloud grips the wood so tightly he hears it creak and groan in his hand. Can feel it nearly ready to shatter.

Slowly, gently, he drops the cheap thing back inside its little hideaway. Though Cloud supposes it’s more like a tomb than anything else.

Cloud eyes the paper. He blows a fine film of ash from the worn-out edges. It’s a recruitment flyer. For Shinra. For SOLDIER.

Cloud stares at it.

It’s bizarre, holding this yellowing piece of paper. He remembers holding this all those years ago. In his hands, back then, he had felt nothing but excitement. Possibilities. The gleam of the future. It was all there. In SOLDIER.

Now? Now, Cloud feels only disgust. A peculiar sense of revulsion and embarrassment. A roaring urge to rip the thing to shreds and let the crumbling fragments scatter in the wind. How foolish he had been. How stupid.

SOLDIER had been nothing but a fantasy. A shiny end to all his problems.

It had been his plan, all those years ago. The ending to the road he’d set out for himself. He’d make soldier, be a hero, and then he’d return home, retrieve this little memento, and frame it. A testament to his will, his ambition, his determination. He’d win the adoration of the town, of the girl whose focus he’d always longed for, and he’d make mom proud.

But even Cloud knew the adage about best-laid plans.

He stuffs the flyer back inside the little wooden coffin. Replaces the board so it notches tightly in place. Then Cloud stands, breathes deeply for just a moment, steadying himself, and pushes the bed back up against the wall, leaving streaks of disturbed dust. This time, the wood protests only slightly.

Then he’s gone from the room. He stops in the doorway, takes in one last look. Memorizes the feel of this room. The scents, the sounds, the cold light of the moon against his skin. Sears it into his head so he can reconcile it with the warmer memories.

_Why did you come here?_

Cloud shuts the door.

He clicks the flashlight off and moves through the house by memory. His eyes adjust, welcoming the dark, reveling in it. He stops before the front door, hand wrapped around the knob. Cloud turns. Glances back at the inside of the place he’d once called home.

Then he pulls the door open and steps out into the frosty air. Somehow, the night feels darker. The air is colder. The coming winter’s chill pressing in on him from all sides. He’s outside, but Cloud has never felt quite so trapped, so boxed in, as if the world is slowly compressing around him, pushing in and in until it will crush him, and he will simply cease to be.

_Why did you come here?_

Cloud doesn’t know. Did he ever?

To reconcile the ghosts of the past with the ones of the present? To plot a course from who he was then to who he is now? To tie off the loose end on a lingering thread in his life?

But none of that is true.

_You just wanted to see if you could still call this place home. You just wanted to find out if you still belonged._

Maybe there is truth in that, Cloud thinks, as he hurries down the pathway through the town square. Passed the shopping stalls, passed the dented archway, closing the distance on the gleaming metal frame of Fenrir beyond. And suddenly Cloud realizes he’s been running. Sprinting from the house like it grew teeth and tried to tear a chunk from him.

His chest feels cold and tight. As if the chilly air has lodged in his lungs, hardening, freezing until the inside of his chest is nothing but blue and icy.

_You don’t belong here. You don’t have a home. You’re adrift. Lost. Alone. You always will be._

He skids to a halt in front of Fenrir, yanking the keys from his pocket. The metal grooves snag on the hem of his pocket and Cloud fumbles the keyring between numbed fingertips, dropping them in the dirt. They clatter on the ground. A dissonant, hurried chiming breaking the stillness of the night air.

_There’s nothing for you here. No home. No answers._

Cloud rears his head back. Can feel the scream ratcheting up his throat like bile. Can sense the oncoming pinpricks of tears stinging behind his eyes.

_You don’t belong here. You’re just another ghost. Haunting the world around you._

And it’s there – that ragged scream – barreling up through his chest, pressing up behind his teeth and—

The sound of his phone ringing nearly gives Cloud a heart attack.

His mind is a mess. All out of sorts and unfocused. He doesn’t even look at the name on the caller ID when he answers.

“Hello?” The word comes out harsh, like a tightly coiled spring snapping.

“Cloud?”

And at that moment, hearing his name, that voice, something blossoms inside of him. He can feel it racing along his skin. Electricity, flowing through the veins that map his body, combating the cold. It clears the haze behind his eyes. Brings warmth to where there was once frost.

“Tifa?” he breathes, and her name comes out like a prayer.

“Cloud? Is everything alright?” There’s a worry in her voice. A warbling edge to her words that betrays the way she’s probably been pacing the bar. Maybe she’s been wondering if he’s coming home again this time. If he had gone off and run away again.

The thought creates a peculiar ache in his chest. A reminder of the pain he’d caused, searching to end his own. _Never again_ , he’d sworn, _never again_.

“Cloud?”

“Sorry,” Cloud says, shaking his head, “Everything’s fine. What’s up?”

“It’s late,” Tifa says, her voice tinny and laced with static, “Where are you? Did you have a late delivery?”

Cloud feels guilty, but he knows better than to worry her like this. It’ll be easier to explain later when he’s near her. When he can curl into the sound of her voice, like it’s a warm fire, and dispel this cold from his bones. When he can revolve around her for just a few moments and fill the hollow ache in his chest.

Had it always been like this? Cloud has leaned on Tifa quite a bit in the past, he knows this – even feels guilty for it at times-- but this feels different. He wonders if he’s ever felt such a _need_ to be around her. An ache to hear her voice, to feel the warmth she exudes. Like a star, a sun – one Cloud is more than happy to orbit. Everything feels clearer when Tifa is nearby. And he so badly wants to be near her, just so he can pull from that strength and sort out the storm up inside his head.

“Yeah,” he says, closing his eyes, trying to feel closer to her despite the distance, “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. Didn’t think it would take this long.”

He can hear the muffled crackling of her hair brushing against the receiver as she shakes her head. “It’s okay,” she says.

“I worried you,” Cloud says. It’s not so much a question as a statement of the obvious. In the quiet and the cold, utterly alone, he can hear Tifa breathing, can hear her worrying her lip.

Tifa sighs, then hums absently for a moment, “Just a little.”

“Sorry,” Cloud replies, and he hates the way the mirth leaves his voice.

_It’s what you do. You always worry her._

Tifa sighs but Cloud can hear the uptick of her lips even through the phone. Can hear it in the way her voice comes out clearer, easier. Like she’s remembering something fondly. “It’s okay. So long as you get home safe.”

_Home._

“I will. Soon. Promise.”

“How far out are you?”

Cloud thinks. If he takes a few shortcuts, he can probably make it home in an hour or so. He decides he’ll speed the whole way if he has to.

“About an hour or so, I think.”

“Okay, I’ll put your dinner in the fridge.”

Cloud blinks, “I missed dinner?”

Tifa laughs, a staticky, garbled sound, but it’s the best sound Cloud has heard all day. “Cloud, it’s almost ten. Of course, you missed dinner.”

“Oh,” Cloud mumbles.

“I can heat it up for you when you get back,” Tifa says, “Do you want me to wait up for you?”

“You don’t have to. It’s my fault for taking so long.”

Tifa is quiet for a beat, then she says softly, “And if I want to?”

“You would have anyway. No matter what I said.”

“Hmmm, true.” Cloud can hear her switching the phone to her other ear as she speaks, “I don’t sleep well when you’re out late anyway. I can go over some inventory stuff in the meantime anyway.”

Cloud can feel the smile gracing his features. “Then I’d like that.”

“Okay, then I’ll see you when you get home.”

_Home._

“Yeah.”

“No speeding, got it? Drive safe.”

“I will.”

He looks to the mountains, to the village beyond that sits nestled in its grave of shadows and soot stains.

And then the realization hits him like a thunderclap. Like someone flipped a switch inside of him, filling everything with light. And now all the details are there, laid bare and plain. As if they’d been there all along, and he had just been too stupid, too caught up in the past to make sense of it. How blind had he been? How foolish?

For him, Home isn’t a place. It’s a person.

She’s saying her goodbyes, and Cloud thinks if he doesn’t speak now, this moment will pass, and nothing will change, and he’ll fall further down that dark spiral. So, he does the only thing he can think to do to keep her here, tethered to him by a single phone call, and blurts out her name.

“Tifa?”

“Hmm? What’s up?”

“Do you…,” he trails off, suddenly realizing he’s working with no entry plan, let alone an exit strategy. He fumbles, trying to find the words, “Do you have…some time this week?”

“What do you mean?”

“For me, I mean.”

“Always, Cloud.”

“Thanks.”

“Is everything alright?”

Palming the side of his face, he realizes how cryptic and alarming that probably sounded. He can hear the new notes of worry creeping into the fringes of her voice. He won’t do that to her, he tells himself, not this time. Not now, not when things have finally begun to click into place.

“Everything’s fine. I think I figured some things out, finally.”

He can’t see her face, but when he closes his eyes, Cloud can picture the way her eyebrow is probably hiking up her forehead. “Oh?”

Even alone, in the middle of a dirt road miles away from her, Cloud tries to hide the smile on his face. Old habits die hard, he supposes. “It’s hard to explain. But, I promise, you don’t need to worry.”

“Are you sure?”

“Positive.”

“…Okay…”

“I promise, I’ll explain soon.”

That seems to be enough for her right now because she lets out a low, quiet laugh and says “Okay. Promise accepted. I’m going to hold you to that, you know?”

“I know.”

“Good,” she chimes in, then her voice settles.

Cold air wisps across his skin, carried on a sudden breeze, but Cloud hardly feels it. Above him, the stars seem brighter, the moon seems fuller. Its light is warm, welcoming. And Cloud can feel the chill in his bones receding.

“I’ll be back soon.”

“Drive safe. No speeding, you hear. Just get home in one piece. Got it?”

_Home._

Cloud chuckles. “Understood.”

“Good. See you soon,” Tifa replies and says her goodbyes. When the phone clicks shut, the silence rushes back in. But it doesn’t feel quite so cold. Or oppressive. The air around him feels safer. The shadows don’t feel like they’re pressing in around his feet.

_You know where you belong. You know exactly where you want to be. It’s time to put this place behind you._

Yes, this place hasn’t been home for quite some time, has it? He isn’t sure when exactly it stopped being that, but now he understands. Home, for him, isn’t a place anymore. It’s a person.

It’s time to bury the past. But he knows he can’t do it alone. Funnily enough, he doesn’t want to.

Saddling up, Cloud kicks the stand back and revs Fenrir’s engine so it roars to life before settling into a low, mechanical purr. He has a long drive ahead of him, so he sinks into a comfortable position and lowers his goggles.

Cloud floors the gas pedal and drives off.

Soon the speedometer is quivering in the red, and the early winter wind is rushing past his face, but Cloud hardly notices it. He has someplace he needs to be.

After all, Tifa is waiting.


End file.
